The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) continues supporting academic institutions of the Kyrgyz Republic in efforts to promote international humanitarian law (IHL) in . In cooperation with Osh State University, the ICRC opened the first IHL Resource Centre ...

It is shown that extensions to General Relativity, which introduce a strongly coupled scalar field, can be viable if the interaction has a non-conformal form. Such disformal coupling depends upon the gradients of the scalar field. Thus, if the field ...

Superconducting cosmic strings can give transient electromagnetic signatures that we argue are most evident at radio frequencies. We investigate the three different kinds of radio bursts from cusps, kinks, and kink-kink collisions on superconducting strings. We find that the event ...

The two-dimensional supersymmetric gauged linear sigma model (GLSM) with abelian gauge groups and matter fields has provided many insights into string theory on Calabi-Yau manifolds of a certain type: complete intersections in toric varieties. In this paper, we consider two ...

Due to the AdS/CFT correspondence the question of instability of Anti-de-Sitter spacetimes sits in the intersection of mathematical and numerical relativity, string theory, field theory and condensed matter physics. In this essay we revisit that important question emphasizing the power ...

While studying the continual gravitational collapse of a massive matter cloud in general relativity towards examining collapse final states, an important issue is that of whether shell-crossing singularities can develop as the collapse evolves. We examine this here to show ...

In all nontrivial cases renormalization, as it is usually formulated, is not a change of integration variables in the functional integral, plus parameter redefinitions, but a set of replacements, of actions and/or field variables and parameters. Because of this, ...

The late-time cosmic acceleration may be due to infra-red modifications of General Relativity. In particular, we consider a maximal extension of the Hilbert-Einstein action and analyze several interesting features of the theory. Generally, the motion is non-geodesic and takes place ...

Gravitational tidal forces acting on the virtual e+ e- cloud surrounding a photon endow spacetime with a non-trivial refractive index. This has remarkable properties unique to gravitational theories including superluminal low-frequency propagation, in apparent violation of causality, and amplification ...

We present the mathematical considerations which determine all gauge invariant actions and anomaly candidates in gauge theories of standard type such as ordinary or gravitational Yang Mills theories. Starting from elementary concepts of field theory the discussion tries to ...

In this letter we address some of the issues raised in the literature about the conflict between a large vacuum energy density, a priori predicted by quantum field theory, and the observed dark energy which must be the energy ...

We study the twisted bosonization of massive Thirring model to relate to sine-Gordon model in Moyal spacetime using twisted commutation relations. We obtain the relevant twisted bosonization rules. We show that there exists dual rela- tionship between twisted bosonic and ...

This article aims at discussing the cosmological constant problem at a pedagogical but fully technical level. We review how the vacuum energy can be regularized in flat and curved space-time and how it can be understood in terms of Feynman ...

We consider the self-energy of strongly interacting quarks and baryons in the medium using gauge/gravity duality of D4/D8 system. We study the mass generation of the thermal and/or dense medium and the collective excitations including plasmino, by considering the spectral ...

The Friedman-Robertson-Walker (FRW) space-time exhibits particle creation similar to Hawking radiation of a black hole. In this essay we show that this FRW Hawking radiation leads to an effective negative pressure fluid which can drive an inflationary period of exponential ...

Recent numerical simulations of gravitational collapse show that there exists a special foliation of the spacetime where matter and entropy accumulate directly on the inside of the horizon surface. In this foliation, the time coincides with the proper time ...

We review different dark energy cosmologies. In particular, we present the $Lambda$CDM cosmology, Little Rip and Pseudo-Rip universes, the phantom and quintessence cosmologies with Type I, II, III and IV finite-time future singularities and non-singular dark energy universes. In the ...

Based on Maldacena's description of an eternal AdS-black hole, we reassess the Thermo Field Dynamics (TFD) formalism in the context of the AdS/CFT correspondence. The model studied here involves the maximally extended AdS-Schwarschild solution and two (non-interacting) copies of the ...

We consider scattering amplitudes in planar N=4 supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory in special kinematics where all external four-dimensional momenta are restricted to a (1+1)-dimensional subspace. Using factorisation properties of the superamplitude under multi-collinear limits and other symmetries of the problem, ...

Several features of an $f(R)$ theory in which there is a maximum value for the curvature are analyzed. The theory admits the vaccuum solutions of GR, and also the radiation evolution for the scale factor of the standard cosmological model. ...